Black and grey botanical forearm tattoo of a bee above stylised flowers, poppy-like blooms and leaves, with a soft pink wash in the central flower.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bee and botanical flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A detailed bee sits at the top of a vertical arrangement of flowers, seed heads and leaves that runs down the outer forearm. The linework is fine and dark with stippled and hatched shading that gives the bee's body and wings depth. Most of the piece is black and grey, with a faint pink wash in the central flower.

Botanical Forearm Bee Insect Flower Poppy Leaves Stem Seed head Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mags, The hives went up on the roof of the laundry on Carrow Street last Tuesday, and I have been up there every night since, because bees keep no office hours and neither, it turns out, does the city. From the parapet you can see the bus depot lit like a fishtank and a fox working the bins in the yard below. Mr Okafor from the flat underneath says the bees are welcome so long as they stay off his washing line.

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Here's the odd part. Each evening at dusk the bees come home heavy with pollen from the scrubby strip of waste ground beside the railway, where the poppies have gone to seed. Last night I picked a seed head the size of a thimble. It was the same shape as the dandelion clocks you used to blow on at Nan's, only grey and tight, with a little crown on top. I sat there in the cold wondering what a bee knows about this place that we have stopped noticing.

Then a man from the council came up with a clipboard and said the roof needed a permit. I was ready to argue until he stopped at the hive, leaned in very close, and asked whether the queen was the big one with the pale dot on her back. His mother kept bees in Antrim, he said, and he hadn't smelled wax like that since he was nine. He signed the form without reading it and went down the fire stairs whistling.

So the hives stay. I'll bring you a jar in March, the dark stuff that tastes of the embankment, with a pink haze settling at the bottom where the poppy sugar goes. Keep the porch light on for me. Love, Ruth.